Free The Bible Repairman and Other Stories by Tim Powers Page A

that my cat didn’t think so, didn’t think I was the only thing in the universe, that I decided it wasn’t true.”
    “That’s hardly an argument against solipsism!” said Hollis, smiling in spite of himself. “Especially to convince somebody else.”
    “I could show you the cat,” she said.
    Kokolo touched his ear and cocked his head. “Lyle’s here,” he said. “I know that was on the schedule, at least. We should go to the area of measurement.”
    “We think it was an alien,” said Evian as he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Not just a, some creature from another planet, you know, but something that ordinarily exists in more dimensions than the four we live in. Or the five we move in when we travel through time.”
    Felise had paused to listen to him, and she nodded. “We need more liquor,” she said. “Lyle can’t drink anymore, but it’d mean a lot to him to see other people still fighting the good fight.”

    One of the two silent men who had stood by the door now opened it and led the way down a carpeted hall to the right; Kokolo and Evian and Scarbee were right behind him, and Hollis and Felise followed more slowly, with the second door-guard coming along last.
    The men ahead stopped beside a steel door, and Kokolo pressed his thumb against a tiny glass square above the lever handle.
    “This might be disorienting,” he said over his shoulder to Hollis, and then he pushed the lever down and opened the door. A puff of chilly air-conditioning ruffled his blond hair.
    “It still freaks me,” Felise said.
    Hollis glimpsed the pool-cue racks mounted on the red-painted walls while the men ahead of him were shuffling into the big room, so he knew what this place was; and when he had stepped through and was standing on the green linoleum floor again for the first time in thirty-one years, he was able to look around at the counters and the bar and the restroom doors in the far wall without any expression of surprise. The lights were all on, and the pinball machines glowed.
    “We had the place eminent-domained before you even got outside,” said Evian.
    The picnic tables and pool tables were still scattered and broken across the floor, and black smears on the linoleum were certainly decades-old blood. The holes in the plaster walls were still raw white against the red paint, though there seemed to be a lighted hallway on the other side now, instead of the alley he remembered. The jagged glass of the front window now had white drywall behind it.
    Still dizzy from the stun-gun shock – or freshly drunk – Hollis walked carefully across the littered floor, past the spot at the bar where Felise had always sat when he didn’t know her name, and stepped behind the bar to the cash register. He punched in “No Sale,” and tore off the receipt. The date on it was June 21, 1975.
    On the shelf below the register was the paperback copy of J. P. Donleavy’s
The Ginger Man
that Hollis had been reading at the time. He had never bothered to pick up another copy of the book.
    Felise had followed Hollis, and now set up one of the fallen barstools and sat down at what used to be her customary place.
    Hollis sniffed. The bar, the whole big room, had no smells at all anymore, just a faint chilly whiff of metal.
    There was a stack of black bakelite ashtrays on the bar, and he lifted the top one off and pulled the cigarette pack out of his pocket and shook a cigarette onto his lip.
    “It’s 1975 in here,” he called to Scarbee, “check the register tape. Smoking’s allowed.”
    “Five people died here that night,” said Evian, who still stood with the others near the door. “Nine survived, though five of them were unresponsively catatonic afterward. And we did try to get responses! The four that survived sane – relatively so – were you, Felise, Lyle, and a four-year-old male child. He died three years ago at the age of thirty-two, in a misadventure during a sadomasochistic orgy.”
    Felise snickered.